Sunday, June 11, 2017

Teary-eyed militant atheist publicly breaks down and says "He broke me". Militant atheists are such spineless bowls of jelly. The atheist movement is a lost cause

Comedian Kathy Griffin identifies herself as a "complete militant atheist". She has had a lot of public backlash after she held a mock severed head on Donald Trump. At a news conference, she said of Trump in a teary-eyed manner: "He broke me". If she is representative of militant atheists, the ideological foot soldiers of atheism have backbones of jelly!

YouTube atheist Thunderfootsaid about the atheist movement after the Reason Rally 2016 had a very low turnout

I'm not sure there is anything in this movement worth saving. Hitchens is dead. Dawkins simply doesn't have the energy for this sort of thing anymore. Harris went his own way. And Dennett just kind of blended into the background. So what do you think when the largest gathering of the nonreligious in history pulls in... I don't know. Maybe 2,000 people. Is there anything worth saving?

...since the death of Hitchens: angry atheism lost its most charismatic champion. Call it what you like: New Atheism, fire-brand atheism, etc., had a surge with the Four Horsemen in the middle of the last decade and in the last four years has generally peetered out to a kind that is more docile, politically correct, and even apologetic.

In a challenge to the secularizing proposition, Eric Kaufmann, a noted London-based demographer, projects that religious people, especially conservatives, will win the race against the non-religious in the 21st century..

The main reason Islam, Catholicism and conservative Protestantism is expanding is not necessarily because they’re converting newcomers, Kaufman argues, but because their religions tend to be “pro-natal” and they have more children.

“What no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have,” Kaufmann says in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (Profile Books).

“The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularization process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.”

Even while some critics have suggested Kaufmann’s projections are too adventurous and that he ignores the existential benefits of being part of a religious community or having a transcendent world view, his long-range demographic study is powerful.
He particularly punctures one liberal, secular platitude. Kaufmann’s data shows that conservative religious people do not necessarily have fewer children as they become more educated and urban.

“The World Values Survey results reveal that a woman’s religiosity is almost as important as her education in predicting how many children she has,” he says. “In some countries it is more important. Young, well-educated urban women who are religious have significantly higher birthrates than young, well-educated urban women who are not religious.”

Kaufmann also emphasizes the coupling of conservative religiosity and fertility is rapidly becoming a First World issue.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: "...the 17th century was the beginning of an age of secularization which has lasted four centuries until now; the 21st century is exactly the opposite, it's the beginning of an age of desecularization. Religion is seizing power; they're not yielding power." See: Desecularization and politics